


What We're Worth

by AgentStannerShipper



Category: Julie and The Phantoms (TV)
Genre: Alex has anxiety, Character Study, Found Family, Gen, M/M, References to Homophobia, a ship i was not expecting to have feelings about, but he also has people who love him, but mostly Carrie, carrie is a lesbian and alex can tell, references to carrie having a crush on flynn, references to like pretty much the entire cast, references to past alex/luke but its minor, who knows when in the timeline this takes place
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-02
Updated: 2020-10-02
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:40:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26779759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AgentStannerShipper/pseuds/AgentStannerShipper
Summary: He didn’t really know why he kept coming back here.
Relationships: background Alex/Willie
Comments: 9
Kudos: 151





	What We're Worth

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this in the like two hours of free time I've had in the last two months, and it's barely edited so it might be trash, but I needed to get it out. It's the only fic I plan to write for Julie and the Phantoms (that show is the only thing giving me serotonin right now), but I just wanted to write a little thing about Alex realizing Carrie was a lesbian and kind of...rooting for her redemption arc (while also referencing all the amazing friendships he also has). Also, my headcanons on which characters are trans rotates with mood, but trans!Flynn is forever. 
> 
> Look, this is a bit of a ramble and a mess, but I think in the end it might be cute? Take it or leave it. I hope you enjoy. I'm sure you can guess where the title is from.

He really shouldn’t have been there, for any number of reasons. If the familiar hum of anxiety constricting his chest and buzzing at the back of his mind would let up for even a few minutes, he might even have been able to list them alphabetically. Instead, Alex drummed his fingers nervously against his thigh, cross-legged on the plush sofa. The pink of his sweatshirt popped oddly against the white and glass space, the floors, windows, and walls sleek and shiny in a way that made his slightly tattered jeans feel old rather than distressed. The latter word was better reserved for him on the whole.

He didn’t really know why he kept coming back here. If the boys followed him, he doubted they would approve, but his goal really wasn’t vengeance anymore. That didn’t make it feel any less of a betrayal, to Julie and Flynn especially. After all, it wasn’t just that Bobby had stolen their music and passed it off as his own without so much as a “dedicated to.” Alex didn’t want to ask for details about what had happened, but he knew is must have been _something_ , because Julie had said that Carrie had been her friend once, and now…

Now she was mean, cruel to Julie and dismissive to Flynn, without any apparent cause. Alex had been in high school once. He knew about popular girls, how easy it was for them to go from sweet to cruel if something made them feel threatened or hurt. It didn’t make it right, but he did understand it. And he understood Carrie. Passing through a lifer wasn’t something he usually tried to dwell on – there had been enough mishaps out in public, and the flashes of emotion and personality were enough to make his heart stutter anxiously, overwhelmed in the moment – but he’d done it intentionally with Carrie. And it had surprised him.

That was part of the reason this didn’t feel like the invasion it probably was. It wasn’t like hanging out with Flynn, who delighted in having the guys over even when she couldn’t see them – Reggie especially, and Alex couldn’t help but smile about that particular friendship, because few people were as compatible agents of chaos as Reggie and Flynn, and he’d heard some of the songs they sang together, Flynn’s preferred rap styles and Reggie’s enthusiasm for country blending in unexpectedly good ways. Flynn knew about them, and she helped Julie hide them from people who might have thought it was crazy or weird, and when they came over she knew because they could tell her without scaring her. Alex couldn’t exactly write “Hello Carrie” on the edges of her notebook paper and have it go over well. When they came over, Flynn knew she wasn’t alone in the house. Carrie assumed she was.

And yet. Alex couldn’t really explain it, the pull he felt back here. It wasn’t like any of the other pulls he felt as a ghost – to Julie when she played music, his pulse syncing up with the drumbeat calling to him, so much easier to poof to her side when following the song, or to Willie when Alex caught sight of him, fighting the urge to blush and look away whenever the cute skater ghost boy smiled at him, unable to fight the urge to sit just a little closer, to lean in just a little bit more. And it wasn’t like the pull of the Hollywood Ghost Club, that itch that unsettled Alex like something had crawled under his skin, the music and Willie and the promise of being seen, being able to eat, to almost _live_ again so tempting, even as he tried to ignore the alarms it set off in his mind. It wasn’t like that.

It wasn’t that Alex had been unsatisfied with Sunset Curve, or even with Julie and the Phantoms. He loved their style, their sound. But it was…different, with Carrie’s group. You couldn’t exactly dance parked behind a drum set, and Alex didn’t know if he would have wanted to, but it could be fun. Doing that. And he liked their music, the upbeat and the confidence and the sheer sparkle factor. It was the kind of vibe he wouldn’t have minded blending with their work for a song or two, if he ever felt comfortable enough to ask. Not that Luke hadn’t offered – he and Reggie had written a few songs together, even if they did bicker good-naturedly over Reggie’s begging for some banjo solos, and Luke had offered to do the same with Alex – but even just singing a couple lines of solo at a time felt like so much pressure. Alex didn’t mind singing backup. Besides, if he took the lead, even just for a song or two, who would have been their drummer?

Maybe that was what attracted him to this place, to Carrie, tugging him back to her side. She had a confidence in her music that he would have killed for, but when he’d felt her, it hadn’t been like that at all. Alex knew what a façade felt like, and Carrie’s was set to crumble if anyone pushed too hard. She was struggling too.

He wondered about her mom, sometimes. He didn’t ask – it seemed like it might be insensitive, going to Julie, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to bring it up with Flynn, in case his interest was taken the wrong way, and unlike Reggie he really wasn’t comfortable enough with the advances in technology to try searching it up on his own. But he wondered. There were no pictures of her in the house, and he’d never heard Carrie – or Bobby, for that matter – say anything about her. He wondered if she was the reason Carrie clung so hard to being something she wasn’t, worried about what her mom, maybe gone, maybe still alive somewhere else, would think. Alex remembered feeling like that, a feeling that still pricked at him every once in a while, on his worst days, the thought that maybe, if he’d pretended just a little bit better, things wouldn’t have ended the way they did with his parents.

He’d known, he’d always known, what he was. And he’d always known what his parents thought of that. So he hadn’t told them, he’d put on the front, pretended to be the suave ladies’ man – but not too suave, because he was a Good Christian Boy – that they wanted him to be. It had even worked, for a while, until the pressure had gotten to be too much and the anxiety had gotten too bad and Alex was having panic attacks nearly every day coming home from school, hiding in his room trying to find a way to breath, trying to figure out how to get through this dinner or that family game night without bursting into tears. Coming out…it hadn’t fixed everything, but it had let him breathe enough. His parents hadn’t disowned him. He supposed he should have been grateful for that. Willie had gotten very quiet when Alex brought it up, bumping his shoulder against Alex’s and telling him that no, he shouldn’t have been grateful for the bare minimum. Alex had gone, overnight, from the prized son to the family disappointment. What drumming and distinctly non-Christian rock hadn’t done, being gay had. Willie hadn’t been like him. Willie hadn’t always known. He’d barely begun to work it out, he admitted, by the time he died. But his parents had always been open to that kind of thing. It hadn’t shaken his world the way it had shaken Alex’s.

He didn’t think it was Bobby who was holding Carrie back, unless his former bandmate had gotten considerably less cool in the past twenty-five years. When Alex had come out to the band, they hadn’t had a problem with him, and Bobby might have been the least close of the four of them, but even he had been fine with it. And it wasn’t like he’d been alone. Some kissing and handholding had been enough for Luke to work out some things about himself before they’d mutually decided they were better off as friends, and he and Alex were quietly waiting for Reggie to come to his own personal realization. And things were _better_ now. Coming out to Julie hadn’t even felt like a big to-do the way it had with his parents and the guys. Flynn had made one of her eye candy jokes, and Alex had snorted and told Julie that it would probably be better for everyone if Flynn knew that at least a third of her eye candy was unavailable, which had led to the boys ragging playfully on him about Willie, which had led to Julie’s raised eyebrows and Alex’s only-slightly stumbling admission that he was gay. Julie had smiled, made a joke about ghost dating, and whether she’d get to meet this mysterious ghost of his – and had faltered, curiously, into wondering if she’d even be able to see him – and at the end of practice told him that she and Flynn both identified as bi. It had been dropped carefully, a little too casually to be truly casual, and Alex had appreciated it. He’d had some interesting conversation with Flynn about it too, the DJ more than willing to hang out with him and catch him up on queer celebrity and media news, as well as admissions about her own experimentation around gender. Alex had known maybe one transgender person back in the nineties – he hadn’t exactly been around on the queer scene back then, at seventeen, but he knew about them – and Flynn had all sorts of articles for him to read to catch up on terminology. She was currently flirting with “agender,” and thinking about trying out new pronouns, and Alex had been floored by how easygoing her parents had seemed about it.

The point was, it seemed easier than ever to be queer. Maybe not perfect, but better than before, at least. Alex’s “gaydar” had never exactly functioned properly (or maybe that was just an effect of most of the people around him, family aside, turning out to be like him), but he’d had maybe an inkling even before he’d felt Carrie’s heart. After, he’d been certain. And she either didn’t know, or wouldn’t acknowledge it.

She watched enough of Flynn’s DJ videos on the Youtube thing that Alex was close to typing “you have a crush on her and you know it” in the search bar. “You don’t have to be so mean to her,” he’d said aloud more than once, as if she could actually hear him. “To either of them.”

So maybe that was why he lingered, hanging around her living room like…well, like a ghost. Maybe that was why, when she went to the kitchen for a snack sometimes, he pulled up one of the websites Flynn had given him, or the page to LA Pride, which she and Julie had promised to take him and the boys to, Willie included, when they went with their families to the celebration. Maybe that was why he spoke to her, even knowing she couldn’t hear him, telling her it was okay to be who she was, and that she didn’t have to be mean, and that it was better, in the end, to feel like you could breathe again. After everything, it would probably take more than an “I’m sorry” for Julie and Flynn to forgive her, but it would have been a step. And Alex had been in high school once. He knew how hard that could be. Dying had brought him to Willie, and he wouldn’t have traded that for anything. But not everyone got that kind of second chance. He didn’t want her to waste the first one.

In the meantime, he really shouldn’t have been there. He had band practice in an hour, and he’d promised to meet up with Willie before then, not to mention after when Flynn had insisted that it was going to be movie night, because she had a lot of films to show him. Alex stood, stretching out his legs – how they could fall asleep, even though they were made of air, was a mystery to him – and cast one last look towards the girl on the other end of the sofa, chewing on her lip as she twirled her hair, scribbling furiously in a book of lyrics and crossing them out just as emphatically. Then, with a thought, he was poofing out, towards Hollywood boulevard, where his maybe, sort of, almost definitely ghost boyfriend was waiting, skateboard in hand, for him.


End file.
